Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Free, Shares Fall 4.37%

This news “blue” people away on Thursday so to speak. That day, the Twitter account @EliLillyandCo wrote: “We are happy to announce that insulin is now free.” At the time, the account had one of those blue ticks next to its name that indicated Twitter had already verified its authenticity as the real deal, the real Eli Lilly and Company. Handing out free insulin may have sounded like good news to the more than seven million people in the United States who take insulin regularly every day for diabetes. After all, free is a pretty good price for a medication that has risen in price over the past decade to over $1,000 a month for some without health insurance.

Well, it all didn’t quite work out in the end. It turns out that @EliLillyandCo was actually a fake Eli Lilly account. The real Eli Lilly and Company Twitter account, @LillyPad, tried to clear the air later that day because the drug company wasn’t about to give away its product for free:

So how did @EliLillyandCo get the blue check if it wasn’t the real deal? Well, since billionaire Elon Musk closed the $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter on October 28, there have been some ch-ch changes. Most of the previous leadership has gone the way of a bunch of potatoes, meaning they were fired by Musk. He’s also fired like half the Twitter workforce because he could. And on Nov. 5, Twitter, fresh under Musk, changed its blue tick policy via a subscription service called Twitter Blue. Before you had to, you know, actually provide proof that you are who you say you are to get a blue tick next to your name. The new Twitter blue service instead allowed you or any other person or bot to receive a blue check simply if you were willing to pay $8 per month. So if you wanted to claim you were a hot dog professor, PhD, you could along with a blue Twitter tick to back up your claim, as long as you could dish out $8 a month. The same would apply if someone wanted to claim they were you and claim they were blue. Talk about putting legitimacy up for sale.

Yeah, file that Musk-y decision under the Didn’t Really Think It Through or Didn’t Consider It Blue category. Shortly after Twitter Blue, a number of fake accounts secured blue ticks and took their blue to try and wreak havoc. For example, a fake Lockheed Martin account claimed the company was halting arms sales in certain countries, and a fake LeBron James account claimed the NBA star was requesting a trade from the Los Angeles Lakers. Also, a Twitter-verified account posing as former US President George W. Bush with the handle @GeorgeWBushs tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis” along with a sad emoji. Then there was OJ, or rather a fake OJ Simpson account, @ThaReal0J32, who tweeted what appeared to be a confession before it was deleted. This fake account used a “Tha” rather “the” used by the real OJ Simpson account, @TheReal0J32, which by the way has yet to receive a blue tick on Twitter. In other words, a fake OJ Simpson account got a blue tick before the real one even did.

The handle @EliLillyandCo wasn’t the only account to impersonate Eli Lilly and Company by securing the previously coveted blue tick from Twitter. There was another “suspended” account, namely @LillyPadCo, which managed to tweet, “Humalog is now $400. We can do this whenever we want and there’s nothing you can do about it. Suck it,” according to Pete Syme writing for Insider. The takeaway was that it’s not that common for pharmaceutical companies to say “suck it,” unless they’re talking about cough drops. Imagine what would have happened if @EliLillyandCo and @LillyPadCo had been a little more subtle about tweeting out misinformation that appeared more right on blue.

By the way, the day after the fake Eli Lilly accounts issued their fake insulin tweets, Eli Lilly’s stock price fell 4.37% or $16.08 to $352.30 as blue ticked creative and political activist Rafael Shimunov pointed out:

And podcaster Robert Evans, who didn’t have a blue tick and thus either isn’t really Robert Evans or didn’t want to pay the $8, tweeted:

Were the fake Twitter accounts responsible for the price drop? Hard to say. Many things can affect a company’s share price. Heck, the stock price of GameStop soared in 2021 after people on Reddit and other online forums noticed that hedge funds were placing multi-billion dollar short trades against the company. Online investors then began investing in the company to drive GameStop shares from about $17 up to over $500, presumably to “block equity” hedge funds shorting the stock. Regardless, @LillyPad hinted at having to offer an “apology” for the actions of a fake account that such an identity bump made Eli Lilly and Company pretty blue, which means not too happy.

You could say Musk is “blueing” it by putting Twitter’s blue verification mark up for sale. Charging $8 a month for a blue tick probably won’t do much of Twitter’s debt. At the same time, it was a kind of beep to everyone who has proven that they were legitimate owners of their Twitter accounts over the years. It opened the doors to even more misinformation and disinformation on Twitter as well. Plus, it could potentially even prevent billionaires from making even more money:

Musk wouldn’t want to hurt billionaires, would he?

If you were Eli Lilly or OJ Simpson and had called Twitter in the past week to ask about the Twitter-verified fake accounts, it’s not clear who you might have gotten on the line. That’s because Musk apparently watered down Twitter’s communications department, as author Molly Knight tweeted:

Hmm, not having a communications department after making a big change to the account verification system isn’t exactly a recipe for success, sad face emoji. Or maybe poop emoji. It really didn’t deserve an eggplant emoji. It’s a bit like eating a plum-linseed-bean casserole surprise with coffee without checking that a bathroom is available and stocked with toilet paper.

So no, insulin has not gone the same way as restaurant napkins. Eli Lilly and Company does not offer the medicine for free. Quite the opposite, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who pointed out that the company has raised the price of insulin by over 1,200% since 1996:

It might be amazing what $8 can buy you on Twitter, but it probably won’t buy you much insulin.